When it is over I am afraid to move, but he doesn't pay any attention to me. He gets up without his pants and his thing is just hanging now, all shriveled, and he goes into the bathroom. Then I hear the shower.
I put my feet in my shoes and grab my purse and run, leaving my underwear. I run down the steps. I keep expecting him to come after me, to hear the sound of the door. I run down the street to the empty subway and I stand on the platform begging the train to come in, because I am afraid that he'll come down the steps. So I cry, and the train doesn't come, and the train doesn't come, but neither does he, and then finally there is a train and I am on it. I am sitting on the train with no underwear. I hurt.
People get on, and get off, and I am afraid of all of them. None of them look at me because I am crying. Then I have to change trains at Atlantic and I have to stop there. I have this terrible smell, I can smell it. And I am not wearing underwear. There are three people on the platform, two of them are men, and I am afraid one of them will touch me, because he will know, because of the smell. But my train comes.
It is two-fifteen when I get home and mama and baba are asleep. I keep hoping mama will hear me, but she doesn't. She doesn't come to the door, she just sleeps. So I close my door and I take off my clothes and then I run to the shower and wash myself off. But the dirt doesn't come off. I climb into my clean nightgown, into my clean bed, but there is still the smell, like a man, like a man's dirty laundry. And I cry and cry until I go to sleep and no one ever comes.
I keep meaning to look for a new job, but I never see exactly what I am looking for in the paper. I do apply for a transfer at Cuo, but it turns out that a lot of people want that job so I don't get it. I never tell anybody about Bobby. Celia asks me how my date went and I say it was boring.
On Friday he calls. I am sitting there working. I'm really not thinking about him, sometimes I do, but when he calls I'm really not thinking about him at all. I don't expect his face. When I see it I don't know what to do.
He smiles and says, "Hi, are you busy?" His hair is down and with it down he looks kind of, well, cheap. I just stare at him for a minute.
"San-xiang?" he says.
I cut him off. Then I shunt my calls to Celia. As an excuse I go to the bathroom. I sit there and feel sick but after awhile I feel okay. If nobody knows it's as if it didn't happen.
So I go back to work. I expect Celia to tell me that he called back, but she doesn't. But he can call at any time. It occurs to me that he could come and see me at work. He knows where I work. Or he could be waiting in the subway when I get off.
I watch for him in the subway. Once I think I see him when I am shopping. I wish I could have my old face back to wear on the subways. But we can never go back.
RAFAEL (Zhang)
"I'm sorry, the only housing we have available is in upstate Pennsylvania." The clerk looks over my yellow tunic and gray tights, my Chinese boots. "Where are you staying now, comrade?"
"I am staying with a friend in the city," I say.
"Well," the young man leans forward and lowers his voice, "if I were you that's where I'd stay. We've been getting a lot of complaints about the buildings."
I nod. "Put them up too fast?"
"Overextended the water table. The water pressure is so low that only the first five stories get water."
"How many stories are there?"
He pulls out a brochure, white buildings off in the middle distance, trees. "Nine," he says, showing me the brochure.
"What do you do for water if you're on the ninth floor?"
"There are taps in the yard. You take a bucket downstairs and fill it up." He shakes his head. "It's crazy."
"Ah," I say, nodding. "Can I have this?"
"Sure," he says, handing me the brochure.
Back in New York. All I wanted was to get home and here I am, standing in line in the housing office so I can be offered a flat without running water. I turned down job offers in Wuxi for this. This is my second office this morning, I've already waited an hour and fifteen minutes to see an Employment Counselor at the Bureau of Employment, only to be told that since I was specialized labor I needed to make an appointment with the Office of Occupational Resources. And now I've waited in line for twenty-five minutes to be told the only thing available is a frigging flat in Pennsylvania without running water. I wonder if the architect that designed this office designed Pennsylvania housing. It's institutional green and needs painting. The floor is concrete, once painted green. Behind the counter hangs a fly strip, curled into a helix by age.
There had to be flies in China, I think, climbing a narrow stairway surfaced in black, industrial no-slip material, I just never noticed them. (Right, flies in the Wuxi Complex. A fly in Wuxi would have realized it hubris and died of embarrassment.) Every public stairwell in New York seems to be surfaced in that squishy no-slip stuff. I don't use it when I design because disposing of it cleanly is difficult and besides, it's ugly. New York has gotten around the disposal problem by never disposing of it. It's nearly indestructible, but going into the subway it's worn to holes. The holes provide slippery spots and heel catches, which contradicts the only reason for using it, that is, to provide a non-slip surface.
New York, in fact, the States seemed to suffer from a serious lack of follow through. I understand that maintenance is expensive, but what about the apartments out in Pennsylvania? When they found there was insufficient water pressure, why did they keep building? (Because where else are they going to put people.)
The subway station smells, a familiar, reassuring stink. Home again, home again. People talk all around me, their voices rise and fall, get to the end of the sentence and sing a bit, falling to say this is the end, rising to ask a question. Not like Mandarin, the staccato clatter of tones. I lean against the door, under the sign that says 'Do not lean against doors' in English, Spanish and Chinese. Like the warnings in Chinese stations not to push, some things are meant to be ignored.
A woman sits under one of the signs that tell you where to call for information about resettlement on Mars, she is reading a textbook on med tech. She's very serious. She wears a waitress uniform, all day she flash heats cheap food. I imagine her on fire in her class, going into work the next day and watching the elaborate physics of the bodies around her, the balancing act of a woman leaning down to get something off a shelf, her whole body flexing and relaxing in symphony. The waitress amazed, her whole world expanding outward, suddenly complex and fascinating.
I know she's studying to be a med tech, a job not really different from flash heating food in terms of intellectual stimulation. She's doing it so she can get her certificate and get out of her free market job, get real benefits. The train stops at De Kalb, she gets out and crosses the platform to wait for the M train. The Mystery train we used to call it when we were kids, because we didn't know anything about the places it went.
I get out too, and upstairs to cross to the Atlantic station, connected by tunnel to De Kalb. At Atlantic Avenue someone says, "Zhong Shan?"
It's a young woman I don't recognize, an ABC, I think. Short hair in the style that all the girls in New York seem to be wearing, shaved high at the temples and glossily varnished everywhere else.
"You don't know me, do you," she says. "It's San-xiang. Qian San-xiang."
For a moment I can't place her, the face doesn't go with anyone and then I remember San-xiang. Ugly little San-xiang. She has had her face fixed. She looks normal.
"San-xiang," I say, "you're very pretty! How are you?"
"Okay," she says. "How are you?"
"All right. What are you doing, still working at Cuo?" I remember the place where she worked, that's good.